Overall 130,000 people in Oakland stopped work. They went out in solidarity and shut the city down to say that they stood together with the department store clerks at Khan's and Hastings.

HOLLY KERNAN: And this big mass of people, a quarter of the population of Oakland, what is it that they were asking for?

HARTMAN: They were asking that the rights of the workers at Khan's and Hastings be honored. That they'd be able to have a stable work life which meant a union contract, better wages, and a work situation where they had the rights that had been fought for really in the '30s.

It was a continuation of the organizing drives saying that people won't put up with the kind of wages which were non-livable. It was at the time when prices were rising. Things like food was going up 28%; wages were static and people were saying, "We need to kind of fight together to make a better life."

People remember other strikes, especially the 34th strike in San Francisco, and they knew that the media was going to spread this information. So one of the first things they did is send picket lines to the main newspapers.

The ruling elite that really ran Oakland were the Nolans. They shut down their tribune. Hearst ran the newspaper called the Post Enquirer; they set up a picket line and shut it down. They went to Alameda to shut down the Times Star. They went to Berkeley; they shut down the Daily Gazette. They just said that no media except the ones created by the strikers would be allowed on the streets, and that included the solidarity of teamsters who refused to bring the San Francisco daily papers across the bridge into Oakland. And it was a way to say, "We won't allow the media to demonize and undermine our strike."

Remembering the 1946 Oakland General Strike

In 1946, the wars in Europe and the Pacific had ended and the country was in transition from a wartime economy to peacetime. Many women in Oakland had been used to union wages. So, in November of 1946, female workers at two department stores in downtown Oakland went on strike. It shut down the city for days, and about a quarter of the city’s population – more than 100,000 people – supported the strike that’s more than one hundred thousand people.

Labor historian spoke with KALW’s Holly Kernan to remember Oakland’s last general strike.

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GIFFORD HARTMAN: The end of November 1946… women at department stores in Oakland, two department stores, Khan’s and Hastings, had been on strike for a month. The city elite decided to break the strike. They brought in 400 police who escorted a professional strike-breaking company on December 1, 1946, and they ran through the city. The cops cleared the streets, beat people off the streets, bullied them and broke the strike, but in breaking the strike they catalyzed.

Angry street car drivers coming through on December 1, 1946, had seen the strike being broken and refused to go though the picket lines that the cops had assembled around the department stores and really sparked off the general strike. They were joined by other transit operators, bus drivers, and soon the whole city was alive with people just flooding downtown, filling the streets and joining together as what they called a “work holiday.”

Overall 130,000 people in Oakland stopped work. They went out in solidarity and shut the city down to say that they stood together with the department store clerks at Khan’s and Hastings.

HOLLY KERNAN: And this big mass of people, a quarter of the population of Oakland, what is it that they were asking for?

HARTMAN: They were asking that the rights of the workers at Khan’s and Hastings be honored. That they’d be able to have a stable work life which meant a union contract, better wages, and a work situation where they had the rights that had been fought for really in the ’30s.

It was a continuation of the organizing drives saying that people won’t put up with the kind of wages which were non-livable. It was at the time when prices were rising. Things like food was going up 28%; wages were static and people were saying, “We need to kind of fight together to make a better life.”

People remember other strikes, especially the 34th strike in San Francisco, and they knew that the media was going to spread this information. So one of the first things they did is send picket lines to the main newspapers.

The ruling elite that really ran Oakland were the Nolans. They shut down their tribune. Hearst ran the newspaper called the Post Enquirer; they set up a picket line and shut it down. They went to Alameda to shut down the Times Star. They went to Berkeley; they shut down the Daily Gazette. They just said that no media except the ones created by the strikers would be allowed on the streets, and that included the solidarity of teamsters who refused to bring the San Francisco daily papers across the bridge into Oakland. And it was a way to say, “We won’t allow the media to demonize and undermine our strike.”